Liquid treatment or, more specifically, water desalination is an important process to obtain usable water. Current methods of desalination include reverse osmosis (RO) and several variations of distillation, all of which are very energy and capital intensive. Another desalination technique is capacitive deionization (CDI), which involves passing water with high total dissolved solids (TDS) between two electrodes, each with high surface area carbon, also known as activated carbon, similar to a supercapacitor. Examples of TDS includes various monovalent species (e.g., sodium chloride (NaCl) and lithium chloride (LiCl)) and divalent species (e.g., calcium carbonate (CaCO3) and magnesium carbonate (MgCO3)). When the voltage potential is applied to the electrodes, positive ions are attracted to the cathode while negative ions are attracted to the anode. The processed water has a lower salt concentration than the incoming feed water. The ions removed from the water and collected on the surfaces of the electrodes can be later removed from these surfaces by discharging the electrodes into another batch of water, which is dispensed into a separate outlet from the fresh effluent. This electrode cleaning process is known as regeneration. Typically, the salt concentration is many times higher in the regeneration effluent than in the incoming saline water as the volume throughput is set lower than during the desalination process. This desalination method has very low operating costs as the energy used to charge the electrodes during the ion extraction step is recovered during the discharge process of the regeneration step. However, current systems suffer from corrosion of the current collectors used for electrodes.